1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for authenticating a person riding in a vehicle such as an automobile, and more specifically to an authentication technology using an acceleration sensor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, probe data has been collected from automobiles and telematic services provided using this probe data. Telematics is a system that provides information and services to automobiles using onboard devices such as car navigation devices and mobile communication.
People other than the owner can be inside an automobile, such as friends and family. At this time, there is a desire to provide services to passengers other than the owner of an automobile using probe data from the automobile. However, the data servers of telematic services do not allow service providers to verify that a passenger is inside an automobile.
A passenger can be verified by providing, for example, personal information and a mobile phone number to a data server of a telematic service, but this is undesirable as the privacy of the passenger in the automobile is violated.
Authentication methods using acceleration sensors have been proposed. In Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP 2002-291047, a portable communication terminal with a wireless communication means has been disclosed in which this wireless device includes an acceleration sensor unit for detecting the acceleration of the wireless device and outputting predetermined acceleration signals, a storage unit for storing in advance acceleration signals detected and outputted by the acceleration sensor unit as a password, and a control unit for permitting use of a communication terminal 10 when the acceleration signals outputted from the acceleration sensor unit and the password signals stored in the storage unit match.
In Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP 2005-92722, an operation recognition device has been proposed which includes a portable three-dimensional acceleration sensor for sensing three-dimensional acceleration, a characteristic sample extracting means for extracting a temporal transition in the three-dimensional acceleration detected by the portable three-dimensional acceleration sensor as a characteristic sample, a sample database for holding a reference characteristic sample of three-dimensional acceleration, a matching processing means for matching the characteristic sample extracted by the characteristic sample extracting means to the reference characteristic sample held in the characteristic sample database, and an authentication established signal outputting means for outputting authentication established signals when the matching performed by the matching processing means has been successful.
In Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP 2007-116318, a mobile phone with an acceleration sensor device is combined with an acceleration detecting unit, an acceleration/personal authentication information registering unit, a personal authentication information storing unit and a personal authentication information authenticating unit (14), and this combination is used to authenticate a movement pattern when the mobile phone has moved as personal authentication information, and set and/or release block functions in the mobile phone accordingly.
In Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP 2011-101118, time-series data for detection values detected by various sensor units in an onboard information device and mobile device (position information, acceleration information, etc.) is used as an authentication key for determining whether or not authentication is successful. Because time-series data for detection values from these sensor units is very difficult to acquire outside of an automobile, time-series data for these detection values can be used as an authentication key for authentication between a mobile device carried by a passenger and an onboard information device.
A technique has also been disclosed in which device-to-device authentication is performed by bringing a plurality of devices together. See Rene Mayrhofer and Hans Gellersen, “Shake well before use: Authentication based on accelerometer data”, International Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2007.
In the prior art technology mentioned above, even when a data server can authenticate a passenger anonymously, the authentication cannot be provided to a server other than the data server in order to provide an outside service.
Therefore, it is the object of the present invention to enable a data server to authenticate a passenger anonymously and allow an outside service separate from the data server to provide a service on the basis of this authentication.
The present invention has been conceived to solve this problem by providing a system for permitting an outside service used by the user of a portable terminal equipped with an acceleration sensor to access probe data stored in a data server in order to provide a server.